2002-02-15 - 12:02 p.m.

I don't know if I ever told the mouse story in here, so if I did, feel free to skip it. When I first moved into my apartment and finally got my couch delivered, I was sitting at home one night, all happy to have a couch, reading and watching TV. I heard a noise, kind of like a muffled rustling, and then it stopped. And started again. So I walked over into the kitchen (about 6 steps) and deduce that is coming from under the sink, where I stupidly keep the OPEN garbage can. It stops, and so I hold my breath and open the cabinet. I look into the plastic garbage pail, and it's full of plastic bags and dry cleaning plastic, and I see them move and hear the rustling. I slam the door shut. Noise stops, I open it again (yes, I realize that this is the domestic equivalent of the moron going into the basement in a slasher movie) and I see, on the lip of the pail, a mouse. A tiny, pink tailed, brown-furred mouse.

I screamed bloody fucking murder and slammed the cabinet door shut. I tried to slow the beating of my heart and moved over to the closet. I called Jane. "What the hell do you want me to do? I'm in GEORGIA!" I call the exterminator - shocking, no 24 hour mouse removal.

So I did something that seemed perfectly logical to me at the time. I removed my Aer0bed, in its little bag, from the closet, and I put it in front of the cabinet doors. And tried to calm down. And then called P. (This was before the roach incident) He told me he'd be right over, and I went downstairs to sit on the stoop to wait. I opened the apartment door, babbling incoherently, and he walked in and burst out laughing.

He gestured to the Aer0bed, propped bravely against the cabinet door. "What, you thought the mouse was going to BUST OUT AND CHASE YOU AROUND THE ROOM???? Push open the cabinet doors? Oh, hahahahahahahahahah!"

Yeah, very funny. And then he took the garbage can out. He told me I should get some traps, and I said there was no way I could watch or hear a mouse get snapped into a trap. So he suggested glue traps, which sounded like a good idea, until I asked what happened then. P said, "They get stuck." and then? " And then you throw them out." I freaked. Throw them out? You throw a mouse stuck to a piece of cardboard in the garbage can ALIVE?? No way. So I now have the exterminator once a month, and the pipe holes in under the sink filled with poison and steel wool, and I got a stainless steel step-on garbage can with a lid that bangs shut. And all's been well. But I was freaked out - that night I closed the door to my room and stuffed a towel along the door, so no mice could come in my room. I'm a freak like that.

Yesterday I was walking to the store, and right below my fire escape on the sidewalk there was a dead little mouse, with brown fur and his little paws curled up toward his chest, and I got all sentimental. Poor thing, dead on the sidewalk like that. He was so cute.

Probably the rat poison in my walls that did him in, too.

last - next